


Walk through fire

by HelveticaBrown



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3935932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelveticaBrown/pseuds/HelveticaBrown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short, dark, angsty stream-of-consciousness piece centred on Emma at an unspecified time in 4b, some point before the finale. Elements of Captain Swan and Swan Queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk through fire

He smells like leather and salt and smoke, and there’s something comforting about the simple, uncomplicated masculinity of him as they lie together in the dark. Her fingers tangle in his chest hair and he chuckles, a deep rumble that she hears and feels through the cheek she has pressed to his chest. For all his bravado, he’s actually a sweet, sensitive lover, and his strong, dextrous fingers seem to instinctively know where and how to touch her. It’s like he holds a map to her body and he knows how to navigate the eddies and currents and flows of her.

She uses him to stave off the loneliness that’s only become a problem since she’s moved to Storybrooke. Over the years she’s built up callouses on her soul, the kind that protect you from the pain of normal human suffering. But in Storybrooke she’s found family, connection, all the things she’d managed to convince herself she didn’t need anymore, and it’s like they’ve taken a coarse wire brush to her and sanded all her defences away, leaving her raw, nerve endings exposed, sensitive to the slightest insult or injury. She uses him as an analgesic, a numbing agent, trying to keep at bay the pain that’s always waiting in the wings.

He mumbles words of affection in her ear, and while he falls asleep easily, she’s kept awake with the knowledge that he loves her far more than she could ever love him. She does loves him, but it’s a warm, comfortable, content kind of love and nothing like the visceral, all-consuming, destroying and rejuvenating love that she knows she is capable of. Sometimes, it feels like she’s settling for something lesser, but she’s not sure that she could handle the real thing, fearing that it could tear her apart from the inside. And so she tries to keep that feeling tamped down, compressed into a little box hidden away in the deepest recesses of her self.

But sometimes, in the dark of night, she slips out from under his arm, and in the quiet and the stillness, where no one can see her, she allows herself to open the lid just a sliver. And when she does, she lets herself touch the truth. She loves him, but she knows that if the whole world went to hell, engulfed in smoke and embers and flame, she wouldn’t walk through fire for him. Not the way that she has so many times already for Regina, and instinctively knows that she would again. She knows that in a split-second decision, ruled by heart and gut rather than head, she would choose to save Regina over him, choose her happiness over his, a hundred times over in a hundred different worlds.

And as she sits there in the quiet, she wonders how much longer she will be able to maintain this polite fiction. She wonders how long it will be before the truth either corrodes her from the inside, or bursts out of her, violent and shattering, like a dam breaking in a flooded river. And she wonders if it’s fair to him to continue to use him as a human shield in her own internal war, because what kind of Saviour is she really, if she can’t even save herself?


End file.
